Wasson, Moore Dunlop (1918–2009), presbyterian minister and television producer, was born 2 December 1918, the first-born child of Robert Wasson and Emmeline Wasson (née Bell). His father was at that time a soldier, his mother was a milliner before her marriage, and the family lived on the Crumlin Road in Belfast. He attended St Mary's primary school and then Belfast Royal Academy, where the headmaster, Alexander Roulston Foster (d. 1972), was an influential figure, interested in the radicalism of earlier presbyterianism; Douglas Gageby (qv) was a classmate. Wasson went on to study for the ministry of the presbyterian church, in Magee College, Derry, and in TCD, where he graduated with honours in history and political science in 1941; a Trinity classmate was Conor Cruise O'Brien (qv), who married Christine Foster, a daughter of Wasson's old headmaster. Wasson then studied in New College Edinburgh, where he was awarded a prize in New Testament studies, and in Assembly's College, Belfast (now Union Theological College). While in Belfast he was an assistant minister in the Shankill Road Mission and in Rosemary congregation in north Belfast. On 1 April 1946 he was installed and ordained in the rural congregation of Roseyards, in north Antrim, where he had a successful ministry, but in September 1955 he resigned to take up a post as organiser of religious broadcasting in the BBC in Northern Ireland, responsible for the region's religious output on wireless, and increasingly for television programming.
When he took up the post, religious broadcasting concentrated on the sharing of services and acts of worship, and, as in so much else in the province and its media at the time, consensus was assumed and controversy avoided. Wasson, though never overtly radical, gradually introduced new formats and perspectives. New discussion programmes brought together people from different religious backgrounds, including on occasion church leaders, who had not had too much to do with each other previously; thus fostering the tentative development of ecumenism, Wasson's programmes emphasised the courteous exploration of different worship traditions. In December 1961 a film of the ordination of sixteen priests from the Society of African Missions, Dromantine College, near Newry, was not only a fairly novel outside broadcast from an Ulster Roman catholic church (featuring a Latin mass), but also probably the first ordination ceremony televised anywhere in Europe. Wasson was proud of the BBC's coverage of the canonisation of Oliver Plunkett (qv) in Rome in 1975, and he travelled for some weeks with Archbishop Tomás Ó Fiaich (qv) while they worked on a film on Irish missions. Wasson also directed programmes that brought presbyterians such as Helen Waddell (qv) to wider prominence.
Although he became a competent producer and director, responsible for commissioning and producing many programmes on a range of topics, Wasson very much regarded his work as an extension of his ministerial role rather than as an end in itself. Reverend Moore Wasson became a familiar voice and figure on the radio and on television, introducing services from the studios or presenting Thought for the day. Listeners and viewers, whether or not they were presbyterian, appreciated his thoughtful prayers and graceful meditations, which drew on a wide knowledge of theology and history. In 1976 he helped set up training courses in the Church of Ireland theological college in Dublin, in which prospective clergy were filmed to help them improve communication skills. After he retired from the BBC in 1979, Wasson taught religious education in Larne Grammar School, and in 1984, aged 66, he accepted a call to the tiny presbyterian congregations of Ballina, Killala and Ballymote, in the west of Ireland.
There for four years he encouraged the inter-church dialogue that was developing in the area; he was one of the main movers in organising an inter-church conference, held in 1988 in Ballina. Later that same year Moore Wasson retired to live in Greenisland, Co. Antrim. His wife, Lorna (née McConnell), who was from Derry, predeceased him, along with a daughter. He was survived at his death in a Belfast nursing home on 19 July 2009 by a son and two daughters.